War crimes are rampant among the armed forces of the United
States in action abroad.

Recently a military video was leaked to
Wikileaks.com:
Soldiers firing machine guns from attack helicopters fatally
shoot a dozen Iraqi civilians, including two Reuters news
employees. An injured victim being rescued is killed along
with his rescuer. Two children are wounded.

The military calls the attack, in 2007, a combat operation against a
hostile force. “But the video does not show hostile action. Instead it
begins with a group of people milling around on a street…,” The New
York Times reported (4/6/10). The pilots “aim and fire at the group, then
revel in their kills.” One says, “Look at those dead bastards.”
Response: “Nice.” A van to remove the wounded man is hit: “Right
through the windshield! Ha ha!”

The Times of London reported (12/29/09) that U.S.-led troops dragged innocent
Afghan children from their beds and shot them in a night raid, one of many. The
victims were eight school children, seven of them from one family, official Afghan
investigators said. A school headmaster said most had been handcuffed.

The same newspaper reported (4/5/10) that Afghan investigators
accused U.S. special forces of covering up a killing of civilians last
February at a party celebrating the naming of a newborn baby in
Khataba village near Gardez in eastern Afghanistan. Two pregnant
women, a teenage girl, a policeman, and his brother were shot when
their home was stormed by the U.S. forces and Afghan counterparts.

The U.S. soldiers dug bullets from the bodies and lied that they
discovered the bodies, the investigators said. Later, a special forces
commander, Vice-Admiral William McRaven, went to the survivors’
home to apologize for “accidentally” killing their innocent relatives
(ibid., 4/9/10).

Two passenger buses in Afghanistan were attacked recently. Helicopters of the
U.S. Special Operations forces struck one of them in February in Oruzgan province,
killing more than twenty civilians. U.S. soldiers strafed another bus on April 12,
killing four civilians and wounding eighteen in Kandahar province.

In a hospital (the Washington Post reported, 4/13/10), President Hamid Karzai
met a 4-year-old boy who had lost both legs in the first bus attack. Carrying him to
a courtyard, Karzai asked, “Who injured you?” Helicopters passed overhead. The
boy pointed at the sky and wept. Twelve days later, Karzai denounced the U.S. and
allies.

Hundreds of war-crime reports have appeared in the press since the
2001 invasion of Afghanistan. These are just a few of their many
headlines:

In 81/2 years in Afghanistan and 7 years in Iraq, U.S. forces have
committed acts like these repeatedly: slaying and torture of civilians
and war prisoners; shootings of civilians in public places and at their
homes; aerial and ground attacks on undefended communities, homes,
and buildings, including hospitals; use of poisoned and cruel weapons
like uranium shells, napalm, white phosphorus, and cluster bombs; and
outright massacres, e.g. Haditha.

The invaders took the lives of many thousands of Fallujah residents in 2004.
When four Blackwater mercenaries were killed there, U.S. forces responded by
rocketing a mosque and killing forty worshippers. After resistance erupted, a
collective punishment was imposed on the city. It became a free-fire zone, in which
people were indiscriminately attacked. Water, food, and medical help was kept out.
The independent reporter Dahr Jamail interviewed Fallujah survivors. A few of the
accounts follow:

·Many refugees told of having seen U.S. troops killing injured people, including fighters and
noncombatants alike. “I watched them roll over wounded people in the street with tanks,” said a
Fallujah resident, Kassem Mohammed Ahmed. Two other witnesses told similar stories.

·One Abu Hammad said he watched people attempt to swim across the Euphrates River to escape the
siege, whereupon “Americans shot them with rifles from the shore…. Even if some of them were
holding a white flag or white clothes over their heads to show they are not fighters, they were all
shot.” An Associated Press photographer, Bilal Hussein, saw American helicopters kill a family of
five trying to cross the river.

·An Iraqi journalist, Burhan Fasa’a, said U.S. soldiers did not have interpreters with them, “so they
entered houses and killed people because they didn’t speak English.”

·A man named Khalil said he had witnessed the shooting of civilians who were waving white flags as
they tried to escape the city. “They shot women and old men in the streets…. Then they shot anyone
who tried to get their bodies.”

U.S. treaties, including The Hague Conventions (1907) and Geneva Conventions
(1949), prohibit all of the above acts and those described below. The top penalty in the
U.S. Code is death (18, Section 2441). But few face justice, and if there ever is any
punishment, it is usually light.

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Slaughter to order

Army man Hart Viges participated in the invasion of Iraq in
March 2003, “laying down mortar fire on this town full of people…. I
don’t know how many civilians, innocents, I’ve killed, helped kill.”

His lieutenant colonel gave him an order he could not believe.
“Excuse me?” Viges said. “Did I hear you right? Fire on all taxicabs?”
The officer answered, “You heard me, trooper. Fire on all taxicabs.”

That GI was among some 200 veterans and active military personnel who
unofficially testified during four days in 2008 at “Winter Soldier: Iraq and
Afghanistan,” sponsored near Washington, DC, by Iraq Veterans Against the War
(IVAW). It was an echo of the 1971 Winter Soldier investigation in Detroit, where
over 100 veterans told of U.S. atrocities in Vietnam. The news media’s reporting of
both events was scant.

In the later hearing, veterans said they engaged in or witnessed shootings and
beatings of civilians, including children; torture of prisoners; and carrying of “drop
weapons” to plant on the bodies of wrongfully killed civilians.

Testimony is recounted in the books Rules of Disengagement: The Politics and Honor
of Military Dissent by Marjorie Cohn and Kathleen Gilberd (Sausalito, CA:
PoliPointPress, 2009) and, in more detail, Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan by IVAW
and Aaron Glantz (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008). Among witnesses quoted,
besides Viges, are these dozen:

Jon Michael Turner. In 2006 he killed an Iraqi boy, in front of his father, with
two shots. His commanding officer congratulated Turner and offered a four-day
pass to anyone stabbing an enemy to death.

Jason Washburn. “… Most of the innocents that I actually saw get killed were
behind the wheel of a vehicle, usually a taxi driver. I’ve been present for almost a
dozen of those types of people that got killed just driving.” In cities or towns that
were known to be threats, “we were allowed to shoot whatever we wanted ... and
opened fire on everything.”

A woman with a big bag approached. “So we lit her up with the Mark 19,
which is an automatic grenade launcher. And when the dust settled, we realized that
the bag was only full of groceries…. She had been trying to bring us food, and we
blew her to pieces for it.”

Jason Hurd. In Iraq in 2004: “Individuals from my unit indiscriminately and
unnecessarily opened fire on innocent civilians as they’re driving down the road on
their own streets.”

Jason Moon. An Iraqi man was selling soldiers soda out of a motorcycle; a
child of 7 or 8 was in a sidecar. “When the man refused to go away, the MP on
patrol put him to the ground with a gun to his head and started stripping his vehicle
and searching it. They then took the child, picked it up into the air, and threw it full
force onto the ground. I didn’t see the child get up.”

Clifton Hicks. As a tank driver, he watched a plane strafe a five-building
apartment complex filled with civilians.

Ian J. Lavalle. In Iraq in 2005, “We dehumanized people. The way we spoke
about them, the way we destroyed their livelihoods, their families, doing raids,
manhandling them, throwing the men on the ground while their family was crying.”
Doing such things so upset him, he attempted suicide.

Patrick Dougherty. On going to Iraq in 2003, he saw no will to win Iraqis’ hearts and minds.
“… We treated our detainees like animals, kept them in hot sun all day.”

Bryan Casler. Fellow marines urinated and defecated in food and gave it to
Iraqi children.

Vincent Emanuelli. He described how U.S. soldiers treated the dead Iraqi
people: “Standard operating procedure was to run over them or take pictures.”

Garret Reppenhagen. When he served in the Army in 2004 and 2005, there were
no rules of engagement for Iraq. Individual units made up their own rules.

Adam Kokesh. “During the siege of Fallujah, we changed our rules of
engagement more often than we changed our underwear.”

Jason Lemieux. As a marine sergeant, he got this order from his commander:
“Kill those who need to be killed and save those who need to be saved.” Rules of
engagement became almost nonexistent; e.g. anyone who stepped outside a door or
held a shovel was considered hostile.

“I was ordered multiple times by commissioned officers and
noncommissioned officers to shoot unarmed civilians if their presence made me
uncomfortable,” ex-Sergeant Lemieux said. He made that statement at a similar
hearing in the Capitol before the Congressional Progressive Caucus four months
after the Winter Soldier hearings.

Another witness before the caucus, Luis Carlos Montalvan, a captain who
served directly under General David Petraeus in 2005 and 2006, said he witnessed
GIs carrying out waterboarding. It is a torture technique, hence a war crime,
forbidden by law.

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Congress has the power

The armed forces are unlikely to reform themselves. The
Administration has shown no interest in stopping the outrages; if
anything, it has stepped up the killings in the two occupied countries
and also in Pakistan. It is up to our senators and representatives in
Congress.

Congress should (1) investigate U.S. combat practices, in the
light of our treaty obligations and customary international law, and (2) enact reforms to punish and prevent war crimes.

Note that Congress has the constitutional power to make rules
for governing and regulating armed services. (See Article 1,
Section 8, Clause 14 of the Constitution.)

Let investigators interview present and former military people,
from privates to generals, as well as victims or their families. These are
some questions for the investigators to bear in mind:

Is the commission of war crimes standard operating procedure in
contemporary warfare? Is the military’s concern for law and lives in practice
usually minimal, notwithstanding official rules?

Will a unit kill dozens or scores of civilians on the chance of getting one
combatant? Does the number of civilians expended vary wih the perceived
importance of the combatant sought?

How frequent are the mistaken raids? Where are all the false tips coming
from? How common is it for the military to lie that the civilians killed were
militants? How common is the falsification of post-mortem evidence?

When an attack on civilians has been exposed, how often has it been excused
as an “accident”? Can it truly be accidental when under civilian law an intentional,
malicious killing — even of the wrong person — is considered murder?

How widespread is the torture and slaying of prisoners and the shooting of
those trying to surrender? In view of the fact that these are capital crimes, why are
convictions of the perpetrators so few and penalties so light?

How does the military justify orders to “shoot everything that moves”; the use
of forbidden weapons; countless attacks on homes, cars, and gatherings; and doing
away with basic human essentials like food, water, and medical help?

How common is outright assassination — which has been banned for over a
century by The Hague regulations? How high up does the responsibility go?

To what extent are the brass covering up? To what extent are they positively
encouraging war crimes? What do officers know about the laws of war? Are the
upper ranks being let off the hook by the hierarchical military system?

How can the U.S. carry out the Nuremberg principle that “I was just following
orders” is no excuse for heinous acts? How can it be made easier for GIs to refuse
illegal orders — and easier to turn in superiors who issue those orders?

How do the military’s training methods — designed to incite hatred and
produce killers — lead to the commission of war crimes?

What is the effect on America’s reputation — and American safety — of its
exporting of crime?

Our nation needs answers. Justice does not end at the water’s edge.

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OK the1977 Protocol

Concerned about the innumerable reports of U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan and
Iraq, the War and Law League (WALL), with the moral support of several other
organizations, has been seeking a congressional investigation of American combat
practices for over five years.

In May 2007, WALL’s coordinator, Jeannette Hassberg, delivered letters
with supporting documents on the laws and their violations to offices of some
important members of Congress. Response was nil.

Besides the investigation, WALL sought belated Senate approval of the 1977
Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 1949, signed by the U.S. under
President Carter but inexplicably shelved by the Senate. The original conventions had
been fully approved.

The Protocol expressly bans attacks on civilians or vital civilian objects and
indiscriminate attacks that harm civilians along with military targets, and it
considers violations war crimes (Articles 51 and 85). Some 167 nations accept it
among their treaties. Why not the U.S.A.?

Amnesty International contends that international law regards the Protocol as
binding on all countries in the custom and conduct of war. The International
Committee of the Red Cross considers it an instrument of international
humanitarian law, binding on all parties to all armed conflicts. Official material of
the U.S. Army does not contradict such an interpretation of legal obligations. This
is from the Army Field Manual, FM 27-10, The Law of Land Warfare (1956 as
amended in 1976):

“Customary international law prohibits the launching of attacks (including
bombardment) against either the civilian population or individual civilians as such.”
The manual points out that the law of war, whether derived from custom or treaty,
is binding on members of the armed forces.

Among treaty provisions, it echoes The Hague regulations by forbidding
“Bombardment of Undefended Places,” militarily “Unnecessary Killing and
Devastation,” assassination, shooting of those surrendering, use of weapons that are
poisoned or cause unnecessary suffering, and so on.